Spotting Design Problems with Smell Agglomerations

Design problems are structures that indicate violations of key design principles or rules. The main difficulty to identify them in the source code is due to the fact they are scattered through several code elements. Thus, code smells - microstructures in the program - have been used to reveal surface indications of a design problem. However, individually, each code smell represents only a partial embodiment of a design problem. Since design problem is scattered through several program elements, we are investigating a strategy to select a group of code smells that is likely to help developers to find design problems. We call \textit{agglomeration} this group of code smells. Our main goal is to summarize smell agglomerations that better indicate the occurrence of design problems. Our strategy to derive agglomerations is based on capturing semantic relations among closely-related code smells. We will assess to what extent code smell agglomerations help developers to locate and prioritize design problems.